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ndi's Avatar
Posts: 2,050 | Thanked: 1,425 times | Joined on Dec 2009 @ Bucharest
#32
Originally Posted by Joseph.skb View Post
With solar panels now finding a more common spot on residential roofs and other places never before, I'm sure the technology for simple mobilephone battery could be improved. If I'm not mistaken it was also mounted on the Mars rover.
Wrong problem. Sun delivers about 900Wh per sq meter in a sunny day. That's 100x100 cm, or 10,000 sq cm. That gives about 90 mWh per sq cm. A phone that's 10 by 7 makes for 70 sq cm, or 6300 mWh, or 6 Wh.

N900 battery is 1300 mAh by 4V approx, so 5200 mWh, about 5 Wh roughly.

Math is nice but in real life you need: charge disspation that's around 20 percent, solar cell efficiency that's about 20 percent, 29 for the really cool stuff (remember, it works only with a limited spectrum).

So that's a 6-7 Wh battery from a panel that gives 6 W by 30%, or about 2Wh.

Ignoring the fact that no battery can sustain full charing current all the time (over 80 percent it's trickle), that still gives you 3 hour charge, on a sunny desert day, from 0 to about 80something percent.

Unless you are in the desert, tough.

It's not a matter of perfecting it. Solar cells have a theoretical eficiency of 29 percent. Sun delivers 1366 Wh per sq meter, but likely not on your latitude. So, basically, you need bigger sails.

And I haven't even tackled clouds, pollution, angle, heat disspation of electronics, variations of light flux, all of which kill figures and destroy batteries.
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N900 dead and Nokia no longer replaces them. Thanks for all the fish.

Keep the forums clean: use "Thanks" button instead of the thank you post.